ADEPT is a 5-year project whose goals are to develop, deploy, and evaluate inquiry learning capabilities for the Alexandria Digital Library, an extant digital library of primary sources in geography. We interviewed nine geography faculty members who teach undergraduate courses about their information seeking for research and teaching and their use of information resources in teaching. These data were supplemented by interviews with four faculty members from another ADEPT study about the nature of knowledge in geography. Among our key findings are that geography faculty are more likely to encounter useful teaching resources while seeking research resources than vice versa, although the influence goes in both directions. Their greatest information needs are for research data, maps, and images. They desire better searching by concept or theme, in addition to searching by location and place name. They make extensive use of their own research resources in their teaching. Among the implications for functionality and architecture of geographic digital libraries for educational use are that personal digital libraries are essential, because individual faculty members have personalized approaches to selecting, collecting, and organizing teaching resources. Digital library services for research and teaching should include the ability to import content from common office software and to store content in standard formats that can be exported to other applications. Digital library services can facilitate sharing among faculty but cannot overcome barriers such as intellectual property rights, access to proprietary research data, or the desire of individuals to maintain control over their own resources. Faculty use of primary and secondary resources needs to be better understood if we are to design successful digital libraries for research and teaching.

To contribute to the development of a sophisticated control of bibliographic works research must build on the growing understanding of the nature of the work and the constitution of bibliographic families. The present study was designed to address the following in the context of a global bibliographic database: the OCLC Online Computer Library Center's WorldCat: the proportion of works that are members of bibliographic families; the size of each family; bibliographic characteristics that can be associated with the existence or extent of derivative bibliographic relationships; the frequency with which each type of relationship appears; and the complexity of bibliographic families. A sample of bibliographic families was constructed. Results indicate that a core of works of similar character constitute the bibliographic population of American academic and research libraries (OCLC members). It seems that the canon of derivative works is greater in the academic sphere than in the bibliographic universe represented by OCLC at large. The size of a bibliographic family seems to be related to its popularity or its canonicity. Discipline, form, and genre all fail to demonstrate any influence on derivation of works. Further study of specific segments of the bibliographic universe, for instance the literature of particular disciplines, is clearly called for. The purpose of this research is to contribute to the development of a sophisticated control of bibliographic works and families. In particular, this research is designed to build on our growing understanding of the nature of the work and the constitution of bibliographic families.

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A goal of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) project is to make primary resources in geography useful for undergraduate instruction in ways that will promote inquiry learning. The ADEPT education and evaluation team interviewed professors about their use of geography information as they prepare for class lectures, as compared to their research activities. We found that professors desired the ability to search by concept (erosion, continental drift, etc.) as well as geographic location, and that personal research collections were an important source of instructional materials. Resources in geo-spatial digital libraries are typically described by location, but are rarely described by concept or educational application. This paper presents implications for the design of an educational digital library from our observations of the lecture preparation process. Findings include functionality requirements for digital libraries and implications for the notion of digital libraries as a shared information environment. The functional requirements include definitions and enhancements of searching capabilities, the ability to contribute and to share personal collections of resources, and the capability to manipulate data and images.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present two models of human cognition. The first narrow model concentrates on the mind as an information-processing apparatus, and interactions with information as altering thought structures and filling gaps in knowledge. A second model incorporates elements of unconsciousness, embodiment and affect. The selection of one model over the other, often done tacitly, has consequences for subsequent models of information seeking and use. Design/methodology/approach A close reading of embodied engagements with pornography guided by existential phenomenology. Findings The paper develops a phenomenology of information seeking, centered primarily around the work of Merleau-Ponty, to justify a more expansive concept of cognition. The authors demonstrate the roles of affect and embodiment in document assessment and use, with a prolonged example in the realm of browsing pornography. Originality/value Models of information seeking and use need to account for diverse kinds of human-document interaction, to include documents such as music, film and comics that engage the emotions or are perceived through a broader band of sensory experience to include visual and auditory components. The authors consider how those human-document engagements form virtual communities based on the similarity of their members’ affective and embodied responses, which in turn inform the arrangements, through algorithms, of the relations of documents to each other. Less instrumental forms of information seeking and use – ones that incorporate elements of embodiment and affect – are characterized as esthetic experiences, following the definition of the esthetic provided by Dewey. Ultimately the authors consider, given the ubiquity of information seeking and its rhythm in everyday life, whether we can meaningfully characterize information seeking as a distinct human process.